


That It Then More Steadfast Will Endure

by akathecentimetre



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Aftermath, Competence Kink, F/M, Gen, MACUSA, Random History, Recovery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-15
Updated: 2018-12-15
Packaged: 2019-09-18 12:36:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16995120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akathecentimetre/pseuds/akathecentimetre
Summary: Director Graves doesn’t need help recovering, but Tina is damned if she isn’t going to be there to shore it all up anyhow. War stories, baseball, and long nights in speakeasies ensue.





	That It Then More Steadfast Will Endure

*

It comes to Tina in a rush while she’s still standing in the rubble of City Hall station – the realization that her plants are dead.

She’d never been able to take care of them properly, not in her whole life. Queenie had always been a dab hand at having a green thumb when she’d wanted to be, but Tina just couldn’t seem to get any sort of hang of it. She starved them, she drowned them, she cooked them in southern light streaming in through the dingy windows of their childhood tenement; at MACUSA she’d lined up little scraggly pots on the edges of her desks as she’d worked her way into the ranks and let them die in the gloom. She tried setting up a watering charm to provide a steady drip of moisture; she tried setting up an artificial, floating ball of faux-sunlight in her makeshift cubicle which drifted tiredly into a corner and refused to do its work despite her cajoling. She visited a purveyor of magical plants in the Bowery and was told, flatly, by a hunched and bespectacled witch with tendrils of venomous tentacula in her hair, that her aura was far too anxious to provide the necessary spiritual sustenance to keep any living thing going and growing.

She’d slunk back to the office in a right snit after _that_ particular failure, and it was also that day, when she’d arrived at Woolworth Building, that she’d discovered Director Graves standing over her mess of a bureau in the bullpen. He’d been frowning over the strands of withered brown stems and leaves, and then she saw him restore them to perfect, blooming health with a steady and focused pass of his hand.

“How’d you do that? – Sir,” she'd said, still a bit overawed by him after only a few months in the Department, and he’d looked at her with a sort of exasperation that somehow conveyed fondness despite not being friendly.

“It’s hardly difficult, Goldstein,” he’d said, with a shake of his head and a half-bemused smile. “Besides, they were ugly. Bringing down the mood of the place.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, and smiled at the thought that she was in on the joke she thought he was telling, about how absurd it was to think that there was _any_ sort of human atmosphere there in that place anyway, and no number of plants was going to fix it, but they might as well try.

The plants had continued flourishing after that, and she’d known it was his doing. She never caught him at it again, but she sometimes imagined the care he must have been giving them, how he might have swerved out of the corridor and stood over them in the spotlit darkness of the Department well after-hours, shaking his head at Goldstein and her sad, dutiful little life as he worked his restorative magic.

She stands on the platform of City Hall station and remembers that her plants are dead, and have been for over two months, and she gasps.

There are others around her who are having the same type of revelation around her, she can tell – other Aurors and staff who are staring after Grindelwald in his purloined coat, in _Graves’ coat_ , and their eyes are going tight at the corners with shock and with outrage.

When she spins to face Piquery, she sees it in the President’s face too, but Madame, unlike the others – because she is not like the others – isn’t made dumb by it. “Goldstein, Slimani, and Heffenbacker, with me,” she calls, already striding towards the stairs with her professional guards at her heels. “Mr. Scamander, you will accompany these others to the Ministry to make your formal statement.”

Tina looks back at Newt, sees him caught between confusion and protest while the grief for Credence still thrums underneath, and minutely shakes her head. It’s all he needs, and he gives his beautiful, awkward little bow and remains behind, with Queenie, still weeping, at his shoulder; Tina rushes up the stairs in Piquery’s wake, her heart hammering between her ribs, and only just hears Piquery’s low bark of an address, 10th Street between 5th and 6th –

Three group Apparitions arrive outside the handsome brick-and-stucco rowhouse in quick succession: the Aurors, with Tina catching her breath as she stumbles sideways into the low fencing around one of the trees lining the sidewalk; Healers, five of them, severe and carrying leather satchels battered and bulging; and, finally, provoking a low hiss from someone at Tina’s shoulder, the guttersnipes. She’s seen the two photographers from the _Daily Ghost_ before, in the moments when she was being pulled away from the entrance to the Second Salem church and all she could do was be ashamed of herself – she doesn’t recognize the writer, but he smells like smoke, looks like drink, and already has a self-writing quill floating ravenously in the air beside him, so she’s not disposed to think he’s friendly.

“Heffenbacker, you’re on the perimeter,” Piquery says, all ice, and she ignores the chaos of shouted questions that follow them ( _Where is he_ and _Is he dead_ and _Is he a traitor_ and it makes Tina want to scream) as she waves the mediwitches and wizards to join her in her quick progress up to the stoop.

“He might not be here,” Tina hears Slimani say; Piquery’s men are making quick work of what must be a veritable barricade of wards and potential booby-traps around the door, their muttered spells diminishing and thinning until one of them reaches out to put a tentative hand on the doorknob.

“No better place to start, Mr. Slimani,” Piquery says, and sweeps into the house like she owns it. Knowing what she does of Graves, Tina wouldn’t be surprised if that was indeed the implicit state of affairs.

There’s nothing badly wrong with the interior, but Tina can also tell immediately that is isn’t _right_. The mess is normal, absent-minded, _careless_ with its dirty dishes and dusty corners and a light left on in the dining room where one of the Aurors is already carefully looking over stacks of papers Grindelwald must have left behind. It’s not Graves, could never be him despite the evidence of all the furniture and books and photographs he must have collected and cherished, and it feels like another failure on all of their parts, the fact that apparently no-one here had been in this space and taken notice in – however long it had been.

“Down here!” someone yells, distantly – they clatter down into a half-furnished basement, one wall lined with a long rack of dark bottles of no doubt expensive and exquisite taste, and then another, lower cellar, all rough-hewn brick walls, where Piquery, at the threshold of a crooked doorway, holds out a commanding hand and makes Tina stop dead in her tracks.

There is something beyond her in the darkness, as the Healers light their wandtips in the gloom, and a sharp, shifting movement, followed by a low and growling sound of warning.

“Still fighting,” Tina hears Piquery murmur. “Good.”

That’s flatter, and Tina’s heart sinks to think about what determination it’s going to take on all of their parts to make sure it’s clear who’s the goddamned victim, here.

“Watch the restraints, they could be bugged,” Tina hears in babble of quiet, overlapping voices, and that’s when she has to turn aside. She stares at the crumbling brick, and catches her breath, and tries to calm herself as she waits.

It feels like no time at all before she has to be brave, again, as a red-headed healer steps to the president’s side.

“Well?” Piquery says, lowly.

“Imperius for certain – Morgana only knows how many layers of it,” the mediwitch says, matter-of-factly. She is taking off thin leather gloves as she speaks, made of black leather, and Tina can’t make out whether there’s blood on them; she isn’t sure whether or not she’s relieved. “The full examination will have to wait until Bellevue. He’s ready to be moved.”

“Very well,” Piquery nods, and suddenly the door is fully open and Graves is just there for Tina to see, laid out flat on a stretcher that looks like it’s leftover war-issue. There are strips of gauze securing his wrists to the metal edges of it, and his clothes, very much recognizable as his own, have that bleached, thinned-out look to them that Tina knows is the evidence of cleaning spells cast too many times, scouring away miniscule layers of fabric with each application. There’s no blood, but there _are_ webbed, dark, red and blue and black patterns of veins standing out starkly on his skin, everywhere, like the evidence of the survivor of a lightning-strike she’d once seen splashed across the pages of a no-maj newspaper, _cruciatus_ burning from the inside out.

But what hurts _her_ is the blank, unfocused look in Graves’ eyes, shifting perceptibly between rage and confusion, unable to hone in on any surrounding, grabbing futilely for control.

It takes two flights of stairs of her hurrying behind Piquery as the stretcher is alternately manhandled and floated upwards for her to put it into words. “He mustn’t go out there like this. You can’t take him out like this – ”

“I will trust the healers’ determination, Ms. Goldstein,” Piquery says sternly, throwing her a brief look which clearly conveys her disdain for whatever it is she’s misunderstood Tina as saying.

“I mean,” Tina says, panting, as they emerge into the sitting room, “the – the papers are out there, Madame President, this isn’t _him_ , he would be mortified – he mustn’t be seen – we shouldn’t – ”

Piquery stops, turning on her sharp heels; she looks at Tina, and her lips tighten.

Tina hopes she’s correct when she takes this as the president’s blessing, and scurries her way forward; she is just in time, before the door opens and the camera bulbs start flashing, to scramble her long grey coat off of her shoulders and arms and throw it over Graves so that none of the evidence is visible, so he’s covered up to his eyebrows.

It makes it look like he’s dead, but she’ll take that over the far worse things the muckrakers would print.

*

It’s two days before she sees Graves again officially, and in that time Newt takes ship. The strange euphoria engendered by future promise has worn off, and she feels dulled and tired and slightly crushed by the possibilities of what her life might become, by the time she slips in the side-entrance to Bellevue Hospital on 1st Avenue. The uppermost floors, separated from the lower by labyrinthine corridors and stairwells which discourage no-majs from access with deflection charms and gentle signs warning them that only the roof lies beyond, have been the domain of wizards since the first days of the venerable city institution being an asylum for the insane and the hopeless. Tina likes to think times have moved on, and for the better, but there’s still something vaguely unsettling about the history of a place where she sometimes thinks she sees ghosts wandering in white smocks and bare feet, fruitlessly searching for their misplaced minds.

They’ve put Graves in a quiet, brightly-lit room in the ward for Spell Damage, which seems a gross understatement. Aurors stand watch at either side of the door, both of which she only vaguely recognizes; it comes to her after a moment of thought that they might have been seconded from Piquery’s own staff. They check her credentials, their skepticism very apparent, but she’s on the invited guest list (she’d been as surprised as anyone at the summons) and soon she’s slipping inside, pulling the door halfway shut behind her.

Graves is sitting up, reading glasses on the end of his nose as he looks down at the contents of an open file folder on his lap; a quill and parchment are floating in the air beside him, finishing a scribble of notes. Tina smiles despite herself, and lets out a breath, because it’s so wonderfully familiar – until he looks up at the sound she’s made, and she sees that his frown is not of concentration but of hard, furious clarity.

It’s the sort of look she’d only seen on him, and only in part, on the rare occasions when someone in the Department had been hurt or killed in the line of duty, and she wonders in a flash what on earth it could be like to feel that for _oneself._

“Tina,” he says; he is slightly hoarse, and she doesn’t want to think about why. He flips the folder closed on his lap, waves away the quill; she takes the seat in the listing wooden chair he indicates to at his bedside and, for a moment, just wants to look her fill at him as he is looking at her. He’s thinner, she can tell now, wasted around the edges, and the fading spiderwebs of curse-marks are still visible at his cuffs, in the hollow of his throat, in the mangled patch of bruises at his temple which she can only assume is what was left behind from Grindelwald’s efforts at legilimency and memory-extraction.

“You’re looking better than I’d expected, sir,” she says eventually, smiling, even wanting to grin. The relief is bubbling up in her now, almost a sort of giddiness.

“Don’t let these good looks fool you,” he says; there is a little mirth in it, but of a very targeted, purposeful kind. “I feel like I’ve been sat on by an erumpent.”

“I could have arranged that for you a few days ago, sir.”

“So I gather.” He looks down, and Tina realizes that he must have been reading the reports she and others had written, frantically, over the last forty-eight hours; her deposition had taken ten of them, and she’d slept like the dead afterwards with her head wedged into her elbow on top of her desk. “You’ve had a busy three months, according to all this.”

“A busy few days, sir,” she says, gently, her mind skittering away from the dreadful confirmation of _three months_. “Most of the time in the Wand Permit Office was – sedate.”

“I don’t doubt it,” he says, with his frown creeping back onto his face. “I’ll be seeing to it that your disciplinary record is expunged, but it may take some time. Assessing the totality of Grindewald’s bureaucratic impact will take weeks, at best.”

“Of course, I understand.”

“So,” he says, after a moment’s pause; he has taken off the glasses and holds them between his hands at his sternum, his gaze as patient as she ever remembered. “In your own words, Goldstein. There’s nothing like hearing it from the horse’s mouth.”

She takes a long, slow breath, and starts talking. Through the blistering, crushing night when she held out a tentative hand to Credence – she skates over how incredibly deadening it had felt to have what she had thought was the bravest thing she’d ever done be relegated to the status of a crime and a scandal, and doesn’t dare look at Graves’s face, because she doesn’t think she could bear his pity – through the weeks of drudgery hidden in MACUSA’s bowels, thinking she would never salvage anything again; through that chance encounter on the steps of the bank (she can still taste the mustard where the memory of it clings to her upper lip), and she feels she is blushing when she talks about Newt, even as she talks her way through a blunt appraisal of him, devotes a few minutes to carefully endorsing his cause, wrapping up the gentle turn her heart had made over his creatures into a targeted argument for the modification of laws and statutes and international treaties.

“He certainly seems to have made an impression,” Graves says eventually, and there is a twinge of self-dissatisfaction at the corner of his mouth. “I owe him an apology, I know, among those I owe to others. I can only regret that the one which most deserves to be given can never be delivered.”

“You didn’t know Credence – before, sir?”

“Not at all,” Graves says; when he flips open the folder in his lap again, there is a visible grief in the tightness of his jaw. “I had read your report on the Second Salemers, and others, but that was the extent of my knowledge. Merlin only knows what torture my shade put him through.”

“You can’t blame yourself, sir.”

“I don’t,” Graves says, shaking his head. “You’re right that I can’t, by any logic. But I’m sure you can understand my difficulty in sorting out exactly where that particular blame lies.”

“Yes, sir,” she mumbles.

“I can only hope the rest of the damage he caused is reparable. If I’d managed to get a message out – ”

“I’m so sorry, sir,” she says, utterly ashamed. “We all should have noticed, I know I should have – ”

“I’m not surprised by that at all,” Graves says, surprising her, cutting her off with an irritated flip of his hand. “I’m hardly going to blame any of you for the fact that one of the most powerful wizards in the world was able to effect a simple scheme of human transfiguration and practiced imitation. Although,” he continues, and now there is a harder, more bitter cast to his face, “it _is_ the first matter of extreme concern to me that he was presumably able to follow and observe me closely enough, and for enough time, to penetrate my wards and procedures, and MACUSA’s, without any of our defenses being triggered. He worked efficiently to get what he needed once he had me, but he hardly acquired everything right away. He already knew enough to safely take my face into the Department.”

Tina imagines it – the spectre of Grindelwald slipping behind her and around her as she walks through the streets of Manhattan, stalking her steps, peering in through her and Queenie’s windows at night – and can’t resist a shiver. “And the second, sir?”

She knows what he’s going to say before he says it, because that look is back in his eyes, the one which promises fire and cold fury.

“Things have degenerated pretty far in this world, Goldstein,” he says quietly, “when _anyone_ in this government, even the Director of Magical Security, is able to get away with ordering a summary execution.”

“Yes, sir,” she breathes.

“That’s not what we do. That’s not who we _are_.”

“No, sir.”

“I’d like to ask for your help in putting it right. We have a lot of people to question and a lot of answers to find.”

“Thank you, sir.”

His look flickers; it softens, and she’s surprised to realize that she’s ached for this for a long while, that many of her colleagues have too – in his absence they’d waited in vain for the infrequent, precious moments when Graves was ready to praise you, bluntly, effectively, instantly making you want to die for the Department. They’d missed it over the months, assuming the lack of it was down to the stress of knowing Grindelwald was biding his time, and only slowly realized that they were starving for it.

“Your capacity for forgiveness is remarkable, Tina,” he says simply.

She floats.

Graves hands her a folded piece of paper, pulled from his stack; she fumbles to take it. “The President signed your reinstatement order earlier this morning. You’ll have more than enough work to keep you busy until I officially return to duty, I would imagine.”

“Yes, sir,” she says, and now she’s grinning, letting herself do it. She wants to fling herself at him, to share just a little bit of what she’s feeling, and he must be able to tell, because he lets out a half-laugh as he sits back in his bedstead, letting a touch of exhaustion show.

“Yes, yes,” he says, waving with a familiarity that is something less than gruff. “Go on, get out. I’ll expect daily reports.”

“Absolutely, sir,” she says, and practically skips out of her chair.

He’s looking at her quietly as she nods and turns, and it’s only when she reaches the door that some reminder of the vortex of horror that this all is tugs at her, wanting her to turn back, wanting her to bear witness.

But she strides out into the afternoon, because her Director told her to, and she’ll be damned if she’s going to let herself disappoint him ever again.

*

**TBC**

*

**Author's Note:**

> Do I not see that fairest images  
> Of hardest Marble are of purpose made?  
> for that they should endure through many ages,  
> ne let their famous monuments to fade.  
> Why then do I, untrained in lovers’ trade,  
> her hardness blame which I should more commend?  
> sith never ought was excellent assayed,  
> which was not hard t' achieve and bring to end.  
> Ne ought so hard, but he that would attend,  
> mote soften it and to his will allure:  
> so do I hope her stubborn hart to bend,  
> and that it then more steadfast will endure.  
> Only my pains will be the more to get her,  
> but having her, my joy will be the greater.
> 
> \- Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti, Sonnet 51


End file.
